


I’ll be at the table when company comes

by ChronicBookworm



Category: Hidden Figures (2016)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 11:36:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16953282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicBookworm/pseuds/ChronicBookworm
Summary: Slowly but surely, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson are getting the recognition they deserve.





	I’ll be at the table when company comes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyjax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyjax/gifts).



After the successful Frienship 7 mission, NASA hosted a party for their employees and their families. Well, NASA technically hosted two parties, since despite recent progress, NASA was still technically a segregated workplace. The food was bland White people food, but it was well cooked White people food, which Dorothy supposed was good enough, and the alcohol was, if not plentiful, then at least not scarce.

Katherine was the hero of the hour – everyone had heard how John Glenn himself has wanted her to check the numbers before his flight. It was always good to see her girls get the recognition they deserved.

The band played soft rock and children were running underfoot as Dorothy made her way over to Katherine and Mary.

“Well, here’s the hero of the hour,” she said, grabbing a glass of wine.

“I was just doing my job,” Katherine said, with an undertone of ‘like everyone else should be doing’.

“Way I heard it, you did a fair amount more than that,” she said. “Or did you not go above and beyond and rush those figures through for Colonel Glenn at the last minute?”

“Well, he wanted them checked, so…” she trailed off.

“And you got to stay in the control room for the duration,” Mary said. “That’s not nothing.”

“Well, that was Mr. Harrison’s doing more than mine,” she said.

“But he only did it because you’d pestered him about sitting in on the meetings,” Dorothy said, getting slightly exasperated.

“I don’t intend to sell my achievements short,” Katherine said, possibly picking up on Dorothy’s exasperation. “I know what I’ve done is something remarkable. I just don’t think it should be – I should have been in that room from the beginning.”

“Amen,” said Mary.

“And I don’t want people to be more impressed that I calculated those trajectories because I’m a Colored woman. I didn’t do it for that.”

“Well, the fact that you did might open doors for others in the future. Now people know what we can do.”

“I know. I’m just being silly. This mood will pass.”

“Well, it should! We’re celebrating!” said Mary.

“Tomorrow will be a better day than yesterday,” Dorothy agreed. “We have a bright future ahead of us.”

“Here’s to our future!” They clinked their glasses together.

\--

Colonel Glenn came to visit them at the Space Task Group. He wanted to thank them all for their hard work in getting him safely to space and back, which was very nice of him, everyone agreed. There was a speech, in which he thanked everyone, and another speech, in which Mr. Harrison thanked him and called him America’s hero, and after that there was coffee and cake – NASA was in a very celebratory mood. When they were having coffee, Colonel Glenn made a special point of seeking out Katherine, who adjusted her glasses and managed to stammer out a:

“Just doing my job, sir,” when he thanked her personally.

“Well, you job made me feel safe enough to venture going up there, so I wouldn’t call it nothing. They called me a hero up there, but you, Katherine Goble, are _my_ hero.”

Katherine pulled herself together, and managed to sound entirely confident when she replied, she thought.

“It’s Katherine Johnson, now, sir, and I am very glad indeed you trusted me to see you home safely.”

“Well, congratulations! Mr. Johnson must sure be a lucky fellow.”

“Oh, I think I’m the lucky one.”

They spent a few more minutes chatting before Colonel Glenn saw that the rest of the Space Task Group were watching them, waiting for their turn with the hero, and started to wrap it up.

“Next time, we’re going to the moon.” This was a common sentiment around NASA, and while Katherine knew it would take a lot more work, she had every faith that they would. Whether or not they would beat the Soviets, well, that remained to be seen.

“We sure are, sir,” Katherine said.

Her colleagues looked at her with newfound respect. They’d been much more courteous to her since her outburst that day, and especially since the _Friendship 7_ flight when Colonel Glenn had asked her specifically to check his numbers, but hearing America’s hero call _her_ a hero, well. That was sure something.

\--

Wednesdays were Mary’s day – the day when she went to evening classes at the college. It meant Levi had to be in charge of both kids and dinner on Wednesdays, but you had to say this about Levi – once he was on board, he was completely on board. The seat at the front and in the middle was Mary’s seat. She had half expected a Colored section to magically appear for her second class, but it hadn’t, so she was taking full advantage of being able to sit at the front, for once. The teacher carefully avoided calling on her, but that didn’t matter. Her goal was to pass the exams, and then become an engineer.

She was packing up her things after class when one of the other students approached her. He hovered awkwardly at her desk until she looked at him.

“Can I help you?” she asked, making sure to keep her tone polite. She left off the ‘sir’ – he was he classmate, not her superior in any way.

“Uh, well, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand, and the course moves so quickly, and I thought, uh, maybe you would be able to help me?”

She paused, not having expected that.

“What makes you think I can help?” she asked, stalling for time. She didn’t exactly have oodles of free time to give over to helping her classmates with the study material, but on the other hand, she was always aware that she was representing both her sex and her race – what she did would reflect not only on her, and being seen as both good with the material, and generous towards her fellow students could only be to the good.

Her classmate turned red.

“Uh, well, I can kinda see the problem sheets from where I’m sitting, and you always get good marks. I didn’t mean to snoop or invade your privacy, I can’t really help it. I can pay, of course,” he added quickly.

And, well, that decided it, didn’t it? She wasn’t some maid, in need of petty coin to make ends meet. She was quite solidly middle class – she probably made as much or the same as these young men, for all that they were White men.

“I don’t need you to pay me,” she settled on. “We should all be helping each other.”

She wondered if that was too subtle, or too on the nose, but since she was unsure, it was probably in the right area between being a doormat and being a moralizer.

“No, uh, I really would be happy to pay,” he said. “And, uh, there might be more than just me.”

He looked awkwardly at the door, where she saw at least five more boys clustered, trying to look like they weren’t listening in. She sighed internally, but kept her voice pleasant as she said:

“How about Saturday afternoons?”

She could bring the children to the library and let them run loose among the books for an hour or two while she did her best to further not only these boys’ engineering education, but also their compassion and sense of equality. Well, she had been a teacher before joining NASA, and she knew engineering. Teaching White college boys couldn’t be that different from teaching Black high school students, surely?

\--

Dorothy had done the work of a supervisor before she actually became one, and she was well used to that part of the job: knowing the people who worked under her, managing personality clashes, knowing how to get the best performance out of each of them (which ones needed prodding, which ones needed a gentle touch, which ones to never put together), and connecting computers with projects that would suit their particular talents. What was new, she found, was that her new title meant she was invited to meetings, that the higher-ups at NASA suddenly wanted to hear her opinion on things.

The IBM computing group was given the task of analyzing the masses of data the space flight had generated, and it was Dorothy’s task to present the results to an audience containing various illustrious personages like the Director General of NASA, Colonel Glenn, and Katherine. Dorothy smiled inwardly at the group of highly placed people that contained not just one, but two Black women.

“And can we trust the results from these analyses?” Colonel Glenn asked. His distrust of the results before his flight had made its way across NASA, of course, and Dorothy made brief eye contact with Katherine before she responded.

“You put in nonsense, you get nonsense out,” Dorothy explained. “But if you know what you do, the machine can do work in minutes what a human computer can do in days. And I can assure you, my girls know what to do.”

The IBM was the future. It was already well on its way to replacing human computers. However, in the present, it still had its hiccups and problems. And of course it was Dorothy who had to deal with it all. Sometimes there was a human-caused error, someone had programmed it wrong, but sometimes, it just got overworked, or there was an electrical fault, or blackouts happened for no reason. In those cases, it was just a matter of being patient, restarting the machine, and starting the work over.

Katherine had checked some of the calculations of the IBM – not all, of course, but a random sample, and the agreement between her results and the machine’s had been very good.

“Then I will happily put myself and future astronauts in your capable hands,” said Colonel Glenn.

Dorothy met Katherine’s eyes and smiled.

\--

In the end, not much changed. They still went to work, did their jobs, came home and looked after their families. But victories were won daily – big ones and small ones. Just days after Friendship 7, the bus service integrated. They took the bus for one week in celebration, and then returned to Dorothy’s car. Black students were admitted to White colleges for the first time. Both of these required a Supreme Court decision.

“It will never stop,” Mary complained, sitting in Dorothy’s car – at the back this time; they took turns sitting up front and at the back. “They will fight us on every small step – they say we can study at White schools, we still have to fight to study at White colleges. We get the right to sit at the front of the bus, they say we can’t stay in the same hotels, or eat at the same restaurants as Whites.”

“The more the tide turns against them, the harder they cling on,” Dorothy agreed. “It’s not right, but it’s the way things are. But I gotta admit, every time a White woman calls me Mrs. Vaughn and asks me to check her work, I feel rather smug. It might not be charitable of me, but there it is.”

“Must be similar to how I feel when I see my name as an author of a report,” said Katherine. “I might even get first authorship of our new work on navigating by the stars in space.”

Both Mary and Dorothy recognized this for the achievement it was, and congratulated her accordingly.

“I get a warm and fuzzy feeling every time the boys at the college call me Mrs. Jackson and ask for my help,” Mary admitted.

“We have a responsibility to those who come after us,” Dorothy said. “It’s a heavy responsibility, being the first, and knowing that everything you do reflects not just on you, but everyone of you sex and race.”

“A White man makes a mistake, they think he’s just not very good, a Colored man or woman makes a mistake, they think that’s a reason why no Colored people can do the work,” Katherine agreed.

“We have a far way to go, still,” Dorothy said.

“Uphill both ways, in the snow,” Mary said, partly as a joke, but with an undercurrent of seriousness.

Progress, Katherine thought, didn’t come all at once. Sure, there were some giant leaps, but most of the time it was a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ kind of thing. Virginia had closed all public schools rather than integrate, but Dorothy was a supervisor. Dr King was jailed for a peaceful protest, but Mary was getting her engineering qualification. Colored people were still being paid a fraction of what White people were for the same job, but Katherine got to put her name on reports. Things happened incrementally, and the small, personal victories each of them had won would spiral out, like ripples on the water. Things would be easier for their sons and daughters, and easier still for their grandsons and granddaughters.

“You know, I think we’ll do just fine,” she said.


End file.
